Currently, a number of projects are using, or have used the DAISY system. These include:

A NERC funded project has looked at pollination of Acacia trees in Kenya (Anna Watson, Pat Willmer, Ian Kitching and Mark O'Neill). In this project DAISY was used to identify both the insect pollinators and the pollen loads carried by these pollinators: This approach permits data pertinent to pollination networks to be collected rapidly and accurately.

The Centre for Agri-Environmental Research (University of Reading) has collaborated with Tumbling Dice Ltd to produce a DAISY-derived product for the identification of arthropod agricultural pests.

The Department of Paleontology (Natural History Museum, London), is currently using DAISY as a tool for routine identification of foraminiferal faunas (See for example MacLeod et al, 2007). This has significant commercial potential as fossil forminferal faunas are used by the oil industry to identify potential oil bearing strata (Norman MacLeod, Stig Walsh).

Showing two examples of Foraminiferal plankton

The University of Costa RICA (UCR) is in the process of obtaining funding to install DAISY with a view to using it a screening tool to agricultural pests (e.g. Anastrepha sp.) and invasive plant species (Daniel Briceno and Paul Hanson). The UCR system may also be used as a general purpose screening tool for plants, insects and other invertebrates.

In 2008 Operation Wallacea will be deploying an implementation of DAISY on handheld and tablet PC's in the field in order to identify scarabeid beetles and moths in the Cusuco Cloud Forest Park in Honduras (Jose Nunez-Mino, Mark O'Neill, Zoe Hall, Elaine Hillyard, Mike Whittingham and Claudia Garrett). There may be a similar field deployment at Mpala in Kenya by a group from the University of Bielefeld who are looking at pollination services (Arnhild Althof).

Showing a Robinson Hg vapour discharge light trap in operation and an example of Xylophanes thyelia (Linn. 1758) trapped at light in Belize

Tumbling Dice Ltd is currently collaborating with the School of Biological Sciences, University of Newcastle upon Tyne to produce a system to automatically identify tagged specimens of bumblebees such as Bombus terrestris (Linn. 1758). This system will be used to study aspects of bumblebee foraging behaviour including foraging range and foraging activity as a function of weather conditions, colony age and colony location (for example are foraging patterns different for colonies in rural and urban locations). In this project DAISY or a derivative thereof will be used to automatically read the numbered tags on the bees.

Showing a tagged specimen of Bombus terrestris (Linn. 1758)

In addition to these projects, the potential of DAISY as a biodiversity screening tool has been assessed both in the UK using noctuid moths and Belize, using sphingid moths as an exemplar group. There is also a school based project starting in Zimbabwe which will be building a digital identification system for East African sphingids. DAISY is not limited to species identification: Monja Knoll and colleagues (University of Portsmouth) have been using the system to characterise pitch contours in human speech (Knoll et al, 2007), while Elizabeth Parkes and colleagues (University of Cardiff) may use DAISY to see if (gehstalt) facial characteristics of human subjects co-vary in meaningful ways with socio-economic data relating to those subjects. There is good reason to believe this may be the case as Penton-Voak and Perrett (1999) have already showed an association between facial features and sexual attractiveness and for males, socio-economic status is certainly a component of that. Lastly DAISY is being used in the department of psychology at Newcastle to see if hip-waist ratios in female torsos show positive covariance with male assessment of attractiveness (Tovee et al, 2007).